Bring closure to closure
Life is not about slamming one door shut after another
In her novel “True Colors,” Kristin Hannah writes, “Loss has a beginning but no real end.” I agree. Memory keeps loss and love, despair and delight, people and places alive. Yet, our society has ignored this truism by embracing the word closure as a way to bury the past and forge into the future.
I wish we could bring closure to closure.
When my paternal grandmother suddenly became ill the last weekend in February 1986, I was living in Michigan. By the time I arrived in Pittsburgh, Grandma had already fallen into a coma; she died the next day. For decades, I bemoaned the fact that I never had closure with Grandma — never had the opportunity to tell her one more time that I loved her and to hear her words of love in return. Adding to my misery was the fact that my illness had preventedme from spending the previous December holidays in Pittsburgh. While I had frequently spoken with Grandmaon the phone, I had notseen her since August.
Then, March 21, 2007, my mother died. Because I had moved back to Pittsburgh in June 2003, I had been able to see my mother and father every day. I rarely left Ma’s side during her final two weeks in the hospital and hospice. Although she no longer communicated verbally, I know Ma heard me when I shared stories from the past, told her I loved her, and promised her I would always take care of Dad. I guess some would say that I had closure with Ma, but years later, the loss of my mother still hurts. I do not feel anything that remotely resembles closure.
My beloved dad — my lifelong best friend — died in my arms Nov. 1, 2014. During our years together — he was 98 when he passed and I was 67 — I told him countless times how much he meant to me. He often said that “I would not still be alive if it were not for you.” Yet, more than three years since his death, I continue to miss his chocolate eyes, his beautiful smile, his kisses and hugs. I do not believe I will ever embrace closure when it comes tonot having Dad in my life.
I try to understand why so many people seek closure. Maybe they see closure as a fantasy — the silver bow that not only ensures that the giftwrap will stay in place but that also gives the present theperfect finishing touches. Once the bow is removed and the box opened, the giftgiving ceremony ends; closure has been achieved. Maybe people like closure because it deludes them into believing that what happened yesterday had a finite ending and no longer plays a role in their evolution.
Sometimes I wish I could have the comfort of closure, but I cannot bring myself to see my life as a series of doors: pass through one door,slam it shut and lock all memories inside it, and move on — carefree and oblivious — to the next door. Instead, I view my life as a book. While each chapter is an entity unto itself, it also prepares me for the next chapter and the chapters after that. Every individual part has a connection with the whole. I close the book when I finish it, but I do not have closure with the book; its characters, story and themesstay with me.
• After the last student had left the building on my final day of teaching in Michigan in 2003, I took a walk through the middle school where I had spent the previous 13 years of my life. I inhaled the aroma of bagels that always permeated the cafeteria and the scent of chalk that emanated from every classroom. Iadmired the bulletin boards decorated with student work and the auditorium crowded with student science projects waiting to be picked up or discarded. As I passed row after row of green lockers, I envisioned students sitting in front of those lockers during tornado drills; I also saw the mountains of half-eaten lunches, outdated papers and other paraphernalia that accumulated during lockerclean-out days.
Reaching my classroom, I stood at my desk, its surface empty of papers, red pens, and books. I thought about the hundreds of sixth- and eighth-graders who had sat in their chairs and enriched my life with their creativity and humor, intelligence and integrity. The custodian, a woman who had become my friend, interrupted my reflections by hugging me and wishing me well. I thanked her for all her hard work and then walked out the door; she never mentioned that I had left one thing behind — the poster I had designed and hung in my room 13 years earlier: “Read a Book, Make a Friend.” She understood that I needed to leave a part of me in that room, just as she knew that I needed to take memories with me. Neither one of us ever mentioned closure.
When I read a book, I often write down phrases that resonate with me in a journal. I read those words to inspire meas a writer and to comfort and guide me as a human being. In “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Junot Diaz asserts, “Nothing ever ends.” David Ebershoff, author of “The 19th. Wife,” confirms this by writing, “Endings are beginnings,” and Philippa Gregory, in “The Other Queen,” understands that “in my end is my beginning.”
After years of yearning for closure, I am glad I never found it. I don’t ever want to lose my connection with the past, even with those people, places and events that caused me pain. I wish all of us had the courage and wisdom to delete closure from our cultural lexicon because, to paraphrase Gregory Maguire (”Son of a Witch”), memory is essential to our present; memory keeps us who we are.